This past weekend I traveled to see David Byrne and St. Vincent in concert at Riverside Theater in Milwaukee. As a fan of both artists, I had an inkling this performance was going to be special, and it definitely was. But the sheer talent on stage wasn’t the only thing that made seeing these two together exciting: their audiences bridged separate generations.
Byrne, who is best known as the former leader of Talking Heads, was one of the main figures in the pseudo-Avant-garde scene of my parents’ young adulthood. His unique stage presence and message to “stop making sense” radiate a cryptic elegance. While St. Vincent (aka Annie Clark)—my elder by less than a decade—enraptures listeners with her chillingly beautiful voice and perfectly simple guitar melodies.
Although the performance was incredible, something else really grabbed my attention: there were a good number of people in attendance who didn’t know who St. Vincent was at all beforehand.
With the issue that a person should know what they’re paying for before going to a concert aside, there seems to be a deeper conundrum here: at what point does one decide they don’t need to actively pursue new music?
Considering Byrne and St. Vincent can share a stage, their musical identities are relatively similar. Regardless, a large portion of the concert crowd was obsessive over one, and almost entirely unaware of the other.
It isn’t a bad thing to have a few all-time favorite bands. Something about being oblivious to anything outside of those groups seems counterintuitive though. There’s no point in completely separating oneself from the broad, and ever-growing, music world.
Maybe this complacency to discover new artists after a certain age comes from resentment for specific genres of modern music. Everyone has been lectured by their grandparents about how the stuff kids listen to these days is garbage compared to Patsy Cline and Elvis. I mean, it’s reasonable that there aren’t many people in retirement listening to Nicki Minaj. It isn’t logical, however, for someone to dismiss all new music just because some of it doesn’t jive with them.
The still semi-relevant and grossly parochial culture of listening to music on the radio might be partially to blame for this. Stations that play one exclusive genre of music irk me more than anything else about FM radio. I’ll pick on classic rock stations in particular because, well, it’s pretty easy. They play the same narrow catalogue of songs (mainly Led Zeppelin, the most regurgitated group of all time) over and over. For some reason, people keep listening.
With the rise of the Internet, the phenomenon of getting stuck in a musical vacuum after a certain age may be coming to an end. Sites such as Pandora are bringing about a paradigm shift in how we listen to and discover music. Pandora is a fantastic tool for finding new music, as giving recommendations is a huge part of the site. Platforms like this are becoming more ubiquitous by the day, thus making FM radio a thing of the past.
It’s hard to blame the David Byrne fans who didn’t know anything about St. Vincent for being uninformed. They grew up in an era when the Internet hadn’t even been invented, and radio was essentially the only way to hear new music.
I have a feeling that generations from here onward will at least have some immunity from stagnating into the bleak world of musical sameness. With the movement away from FM radio towards the Internet, which harbors infinite possibilities, discovering new artists is easier now than ever before. It’s hard to be anything but optimistic about our chances of not having to settle musically, even as adults.
